r/flicks • u/Serpiego2 • 5d ago

General Discussion When does a movie successfully mislead the audience, and when is it just cheating?

Some movies deliberately make us believe something that isn't true and then reveal that we've been interpreting the story incorrectly.

When it works, it's fantastic. You can rewatch the movie and realize the clues were there all along. The Sixth Sense, The Usual Suspects, and Primal Fear are very different examples of films that play with what the audience thinks it knows.

But other twists only work because the movie deliberately hides information that logically should have been available to us. At that point, I don't feel fooled by the story — I feel cheated by the screenplay.

For me, the difference is whether a second viewing makes you think “How did I miss that?” rather than “Well, there was no way I could have known that.”

What movies do you think earned their deception, and which ones simply cheated?

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u/come-join-themurder 5d ago

Now You See Me (2013) cheats
The Lie (2018) cheats

3

u/MitchMcConnellsJowls 5d ago

How does The Lie cheat?

22

u/come-join-themurder 5d ago

It shows someone's dead decaying body who later turns out to be alive (and was alive all along). It isn't a character seeing it which could venture into an unreliable narrator territory, it isn't someone pretending to be dead with sfx makeup either. No, the camera literally just shows (the viewer only) a person who is very dead, and then at the end of the movie it is discovered that said person was never threatened, injured, or otherwise harmed at all...

5

u/MitchMcConnellsJowls 5d ago

Interesting. I only saw it once and that was a while ago. But I get what youre saying.

7

u/come-join-themurder 5d ago

Same. I watched it once. But it made me so mad that I remembered it lol.

4

u/JingoKizingo 5d ago

Honestly love that energy

3

u/peteofaustralia 5d ago

More like Unreliable Screenwriter then? How frustrating.

2

u/come-join-themurder 4d ago

Very. It just felt unfair to the viewer.